In recent years, automated equipment has been developed for the handling of large volumes of documents (e.g., letters, postcards, checks, etc.). For example, high-speed, mail sort machines are now available for automatically sorting large volumes of mail by ZIP Code destination. As will be appreciated, such machines greatly reduce the time and manpower otherwise required in the manual sorting of the mail. Such machines are now in use by both the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and large government and civilian mailers.
A typical, high-speed sort machine is comprised of a feed section which feeds mail pieces one-by-one past a reader which electronically "reads" the ZIP Code or like information on the piece and generates a signal which directs the piece to its designated sort pocket located in a stacker section of the sort machine. An example of such a sort machine is the MS-1200, manufactured and distributed by National Presort, Inc., Dallas, Tex.
For such a machine to carry out efficient sort schemes, it must have a large number of sort pockets available for each pass of the mail through the machine. Heretofore, machine having large number of pockets have stacker sections in which the pockets are aligned in a single, horizontal row. While such an arrangement greatly simplifies the transport between the feeder and the stacker section, it produces a machine which has a large "footprint". That is, a machine of this type requires a large area of floor space for both installation and operation.
Due to the large floor space required, the use of high-speed, multi-pocket sort machines have been restricted primarily to large Post Offices and/or large mail centers where adequate space is available. However, with the ever increasing volumes of mail, the need arises for efficient, high-speed, multi-pocket sort machines which can be used in either large or small Post Offices and/or mail centers where available floor space is limited.